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American Express is juicing up its Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) Credit Card in August. With the enhanced product benefits, the new annual fee will increase from $65 to $95 effective August 11, 2015. The first year of Card Membership is free and $95 annually thereafter.

Nearly 70% of money sent through Western Union in the United States is picked up by receivers on the same day, with nearly one-third picking it up within one hour. Globally, nearly 70% of payouts made by Western Union are picked up by receivers in major remittance receiving countries within 24 hours as well.

Virtual Piggy, provider of the payment technology Oink, announced the release of its new and improved app, which will include peer-to-peer functionality allowing teens to receive deposits to their accounts for work or gifts from family and friends.

American Express is upping the ante for its Premier Rewards Gold Cardholders with new dining and travel benefits. Now offering double Membership Rewards points at U.S. restaurants and a $100 airline fee credit at one airline for incidental charges such as baggage fees.

Bitcoin payments for TAR Airlines, a regional Airline from Mexico, is now enabled thanks to Openpay. TAR Airlines is the first merchant to accept bitcoin payments through Openpay’s platform and the first airline from Latin America to accept bitcoin.

With a maximum of 40 transaction processing servers running on inexpensive commodity hardware, NuoDB’s performance was seven times higher as compared to its previous version — processing more than one million transactions per minute.